Club Sándwich2013

This charming Mexican film is both poignant and laugh-out-loud funny as the relationship between a holidaying 15-year-old boy and his loving mother is tested by the arrival on the scene of a girl his own age.

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In his latest super-slow-burning comedy, Fernando Eimbcke (Duck Season) pinpoints the shifts in a teenage boy’s intimacy with his mother as he takes his first awkward steps into the uncharted waters of intimacy elsewhere. Chubby 15-year-old Héctor and his 30-something single mother Paloma are on holiday together, lolling about in a torpor of companionable boredom. They have the off-season resort to themselves until a strange couple intrude with their 16-year-old daughter, Jazmín. She immediately sets her sights on Héctor. In Eimbcke’s patented deadpan style, Héctor and Jazmín have bewilderingly little to say to each other, though something’s definitely stirring between them. Eimbcke has comic timing down to a beat, and Paloma has a way of turning up precisely when Héctor would rather she didn’t. The beauty of Club Sándwich is how delicately it traces her conflicting emotions and her wavering determination to withdraw gracefully.

“The essence of evocative simplicity… Eimbcke seems to have set out to make a minimalist film with maximum pathos, as befits the accumulation of tiny actions that a loving mom is well placed to observe and feel deeply.” — Rob Nelson, Variety

U ri Sunhi

Hong Sang-soo

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